I ran across Arduino a few months back and now I have product I want to develop. Is Arduino just a protyping and hobbyist tool or is it actually used in products that are sold?
Anyways, I don't do electronics but I do code. I'm looking for someone who wants to help me with the electronic side of my new venture.
It's used in products that are sold, either off-the-shelf (for low volumes) or the basic Arduino design is incorporated as part of a custom design. Here are some of our custom products that demonstrate this:
Some of our designs are shields that are then paired with Arduinos to form products, others are standalone products with Arduino (or Arduino-esque) infrastructure.
If you need help with the electronic side of your new venture, contact us (support@ruggedcircuits.com).
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The QuadRAM shield: add 512 kilobytes of external RAM to your Arduino Mega/Mega2560
You can detail some requested work for the hardware person and ask for collaborators or people to hire. Best would be a local person so be sure to update your profile to at least include your region/country.
KipMN:
Is Arduino just a protyping and hobbyist tool or is it actually used in products that are sold?
Arduino is a great way to get your product up and running, and then from there you can decide what pieces (if any) of the system meet your production needs.
The most interesting thing about Arduino, IMO, is the community. The system is pretty much THE center of open source microcontroller work. Lots of code, projects, know-how, advice available.
Atmel has a rich line of microcontrollers that folks have gotten to be compatible with Arduino, so there's a decent chance one of them will fit what you need.
For this question it's also worth looking at each of the component pieces of an Arduino setup:
In a production setting, the bootloader and libraries will still add a lot of value. The hardware board less so because you'd likely deign (or have designed) a custom piece of hardware for your product. And the IDE is useless in a professional setting because it's so limited.
In my previous Job, a lot of atmel controllers were used for price-signs at petrol stations. Some of those are also used on older Arduino-boards, ATmega1280 and Atmega168.
Ofcourse we didn't use standard Arduino-boards in the final product, just the microcontrollers were used with all other "Price sign"-electronics on the same boards.
Instead of using the Arduino IDE... AVR studio was used (we only got the hex-files by the way), but yes, in theory you can find "Arduinos" everywhere.
We did just the assembly-part, but apparently our client sold the price signs from pole to pole and was one of the biggest. Should you ever need to control 6-16 inch 7 segment displays by arduino and have little problems with ethics..... 
You could instead use the Arduino Project Board. http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Project-Board/
As a lighter alternative instead of putting the entire arduino in.